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Prescott: a class act...?

I keep reading reviews of Prescott: The Class System and Me (Mondays, 9pm, BBC2) so decided I should watch it. No great surprises - Prescott is what we all know him to be - proud of his working-class roots but equally proud of his large house ("Prescott Castle"), his Jags and his croquet. What a conundrum the man is! - or so the voiceover kept telling us. I don't have any strong feelings for the man - good on him for getting to where he is, though he can be rather annoying. The reviews have all raved about the wonders of Pauline Prescott, who seems like a pleasant well-meaning woman, if rather less hard-edged than her husband, who declares "The upper classes are the enemy!" Two scenes seemd particularly revealing: firstly, when he met some teenage girls, who explained to him what chavs were and that they weren't chavs. Prescott asked what class they thought they were; one of them asserted she was middle-class. Prescott expressed surprise; he thought she was working class. "But I don't work," she explained patiently. I presume her trust fund keeps her going while she looks for a job. He seemed proud of his ability to communicate with these youngsters; however, this was based on swapping tales of people they have punched. Not a great role model, then. The other moment was at Henley, where Prescott, clearly uncomfortable among the blazers and Pimms, points out to some young men that "only 7.5% of the population go to private schools, but they occupy 80% of high-level civil service, legal and political positions". This is wrong, he explains. One of the lads asks if perhaps that's indicative of the standard of education offered by the private schools. Prescott glosses over this. But surely this is exactly the point. The programme stresses over and over that class is not about money. They don't consider exactly what it is about, but the essence of it, as Prescott agonises over his grammar and claims to never have read a book, is that education is what makes you what you are. Surely, rather than trying to destroy privilege, Prescott should want to improve education, not destroy what already works. He comes across as a man deeply jealous of those who have had a good education, who speak well and use good grammar. One wonders why, if it matters that much to him, he didn't try to remedy this years ago. But then, perhaps, he wouldn't be able to go on about his working-class background and the perceived insidious evil of the middle- and upper-classes so much.

Twenty years of the Pre-Raphaelite Society

The Pre-Raphaelite Society is celebrating 20 years since it began in Birmingham. Since it began, the PRS has followed its aims of "the celebration of the mood and style of art which Ruskin recognised and preserved by his writings, and to the observation of its wide-ranging influence. In co-operation with societies of similar aims world-wide, it seeks to commemorate Pre-Raphaelite ideals by means of meetings, conferences, discussions, publications and correspondence, and to draw attention to significant scholastic work in this field. First and foremost, however, it is a society in which individuals can come together to enjoy the images and explore the personalities of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers through the medium of fine art, the appreciation of good design and the excellence of the traditional arts."

We have celebrated our 20th anniversary with a conference, "Eminent Pre-Raphaelites", in Birmingham this summer, with a cake at the AGM, dinners and teas, and finally with a celebratory issue of the Review, consisting of contributions from well-known names such as Jan Marsh, Paul Barlow, Angela Thirlwell, Anne Anderson, Benedict Read and Paul Goldman, featuring the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Subversive Reading

The excellent Birmingham Book Festival commissioned the philosopher A C Grayling to give a lecture at the festival this year, entitled "The Good Reader and the World". This is in part a tribute to the National Year of Reading, which encourages the promotion of literacy for children and enjoyment of reading for everyone. In line with this, Professor Grayling began his lecture by giving a detailed summary of the history of reading, from the earliest known literate communities in Ancient Egypt through to the reading explosion of the autodidacts of the nineteenth century. Grayling particularly emphasised the impacts of the early printing presses, particularly their significance not only in rising literacy, but in the fact that literacy was therefore no longer largely exclusive to the church and the ruling classes. The subversiveness of access to religious texts, for example, is not something we think much of these days, but it meant that more people were able to challenge the church on the basis of their own reading - literacy is pwer, and as it spreads power is disseminated. During the Renaissance the importance of the classical literature of Ovid, Cicero, Virgil etc allowed "insight into the wider mind of Europe", broadening the views of those who could read them (which was of course still a small minority). By the nineteenth century, however, books were cheaper and more available, and more people could read - especially essays and poetry - and many of the working-class were able to educate themselves through their reading. This is hugely significant for social development of a country as a whole, Grayling pointed out, because those who read are thinking more; for example, revolutionaries in the seventeenth century such as the Levellers and the New Model Army were literate, which is hardly a coincidence.

Grayling emphasised the different modes of reading - passive reading, for plot alone, such as one might with a beach novel, and intensive reading, where one puts thought and consideration into the book, permitting a dialogue between reader and author, disagreeing with it, coming to one's own conclusions. This, he suggests, is the way to be fulfilled in one's reading, and it has a transformative effect on the reader. Some books, of course, invite purely passive reading, while others engage the reader sometimes against their will, and it those that are treasures.

Modern British education fosters "literacy" and "numeracy" in the quest to turn citizens into "good foot-soldiers in the economic battle", but as Grayling says, Aristotle said that the point of education was to make "noble use of our leisure". Education isn't about getting a job; it's about one's life and what one does with it, and permits one to be a "responsible contributor to public conversation", and indeed a responsible voter, too. Looking at the future of reading, Grayling is optimistic, suggesting that there will always be readers, and always people who do find necessary stimulation in books, even if the nature of "books" as we know them is overtaken by technology. The content of books "will never be far from the centre of a genuinely civilised society".

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy is, it seems, fast becoming something of a grande dame of British poetry, and with good reason. I have always enjoyed her poems, but it wasn't until I went to hear her read at the Birmingham Book Festival earlier this week that I realised just how well-written her poems are, and how they stand up to scrutiny. "Something for everyone" is a phrase I use but generally dislike, but it does seem to be kind of true in this case: she opened her reading with extracts from 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls High', a poem which rather reminds me of my own schooldays and the infectious laughter of teenage girls (although usually schools don't need to be closed down because of laughter!) It's a funny poem, unsurprisingly, being about laughter, but it's also an amazingly descriptive poems that captures individuals caught up in a mass movement of laughter. Certainly Duffy's reading raised much laughter from the audience.

Her next few poems were also familiar to me, and no doubt to many in the audience: 'Mrs Midas', 'Mrs Aesop', 'Mrs Faust' - these are also funny poems, and yet as she reads, with a dry humour and a delicious slowness which lingers on the words, her choice of words becomes ever more significant. Everyone should have to listen to poetry read aloud properly (not the mangled syllables of the classroom) - listening, one is forced to become a passive auditor, which allows the imagination that much more action, and imbues the poems with something quite different. I was disappointed that she didn't read one of my favourite poems, though, 'A Dreaming Week' from her book Feminine Gospels, which seems langorously to play with words for the hell of it, and the effect is sensuous, soporific and somehow thrilling. Duffy is also a poet who knows the power of repetition - either of words or of sounds of words, and she uses it not just for humorous effect but also for pathos and drama, which even her most amusing poems contain.

Finally, she read some more serious poems from her most recent book, Rapture. This is rather different from her other work, being a book of love poems, but there's nothing soppy or unneccessary here. The book is based on the "fractured sonnet form", she says, suggesting that the sonnet is a kind of secular prayer: short, memorable, adhering to conventions, and expressing very personal emotions. She told the audience that she had abandoned religion at fifteen, and now feels that "prayer must be a comfort for believers, but atheists have only art". The last poem she read, 'Prayer', reflects this, using secular images to fill the mind in a kind of worship. All her poems seem to have a kind of intertextuality - referring to other poems, other forms, works of art - yet she makes them entirely available to the audience, chatting as she goes about Greek mythology, T S Eliot, Shakespeare, mobile phones, cups of tea...I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

National Student Forum

I'm delighted to say that the National Student Forum has launched our first annual report. This was presented to the Government by our chair last week, and we have been promised a formal response to the points we have raised about improving life for students in the UK.

We now have a website, which means that hopefully people will start to know who we are! The website, with information about who we are and what we do, and also with a link to the report, can be found here.

Muliebrity and other pertinent words

Some oppugnant people at Collins Dictionaries have decided to remove some little-known words from the dictionary - presumably to make more room for text speak, celebrity names and other passing fads. Now, I know that some of these words aren't exactly in common parlance - but why not? I can think of many uses for muliebrity - the condition of being a woman (in fact, that's going into my PhD thesis), and fubsy, griseous and olid are words that nicely describe how I feel about some people. I'm all for the development of the language - English has amazing flexibility and its ability to encompass other languages and change with the times is one of many things that makes English literature such a joy, but if we lose words, they'll be consigned to footnotes, as obscure as some of Chaucer's words, and that's a pity. Perhaps I should start a campaign to revive Chaucerian English. Failing that - have a look at these words and see if you can use them! You can read more about this here.
Abstergent Cleansing or scouring
Agrestic Rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth
Apodeictic Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
Caducity Perishableness; senility
Caliginosity Dimness; darkness
Compossible Possible in coexistence with something else
Embrangle To confuse or entangle
Exuviate To shed (a skin or similar outer covering)
Fatidical Prophetic
Fubsy Short and stout; squat
Griseous Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey
Malison A curse
Mansuetude Gentleness or mildness
Muliebrity The condition of being a woman
Niddering Cowardly
Nitid Bright; glistening
Olid Foul-smelling
Oppugnant Combative, antagonistic or contrary
Periapt A charm or amulet
Recrement Waste matter; refuse; dross
Roborant Tending to fortify or increase strength
Skirr A whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
Vaticinate To foretell; prophesy
Vilipend To treat or regard with contempt